Live-Blogging The Red and the Black

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I took Stendhal’sThe Red and the Black along on a recent trip to Paris. It’s only now though that I’m back in Philadelphia that young Julien Sorel has finally arrived in La Ville-Lumiere.

It took me awhile to get into the book. I began it hoping for the same pleasures I recently found in Middlemarch, but it quickly became apparently that it’s for different reasons that Stendhal’s classic is still read today. It lacks, or does not even attempt, Eliot’s perspicaciously drawn characters and lyrical insights. Sorel, though by turns beguiling and irritating, is drawn more as a cipher than a real person. Instead, The Red and the Black is a determinedly political novel, engaged in direct and often obscure conversation with the 19th-century French society to which it was submitted.

Nevertheless, halfway through, The Red and the Black has me gripped. It is exhilarating to read a novel so urgently engaged with the culture and society of which it’s a part. The Red and the Black feels like an act of revolution, and it is not hard to imagine the discomfiture it must have caused among the King’s court and clergy. At the same time, it is just this potency that gives The Red and the Black the quality of an artifact. It is nearly impossible to imagine a novel having anything approaching Stendhal’s intended effect on contemporary society, French or American. All polemical notes have already been sounded and absorbed and we’re too inured to blush much anymore.

An uncharacteristically thorough post at Gawker goes in depth on the make up of the current staff of the New Yorker, pointing out that the resurgent magazine under editor David Remnick is staffed by a disproportionate number of writers brought on during the tenure of reviled editor Tina Brown. Interesting stuff.

A small but satisfyingly eclectic batch of blurbs from the pen of Zadie Smith. Prior to today, I don't think I'd ever seen the phrase "the mutt's nuts" printed on the back of a book.On Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi - "This is an excellent comic book, that deserves a place with Joe Sacco and even Art Spiegelman. In her bold black and white panels, Satrapi eloquently reasserts the moral bankruptcy of all political dogma and religious conformity; how it bullies, how it murders, and how it may always be ridiculed by individual rebellions of the spirit and the intellect"On Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives by Simon Goldhill - "It's great, and great fun... a sparkling, erudite and amusing remedy for our collective historical amnesia"On Dogwalker by Arthur Bradford - "Arthur Bradford's stories are quite simply the mutt's nuts: One of the funniest, smartest, tallest writers working in America today."On The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman "Ms. Fusselman's book, brief as it is, affected me deeply. Not only that, the talent displayed therein was somewhat unnerving."On Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer - "The kind of brilliance for narrative that should make her peers envious and her readers very, very grateful."See Also: The Collected Blurbs of Jonathan Safran Foer, The Collected Blurbs of David Mitchell

An article by Warren St. John, to appear in the New York Times tomorrow, declares that the person who appears in public as JT Leroy is, in fact, Savannah Knoop the half-sister of Geoffrey Knoop, who, with Laura Albert, is suspected of creating the Leroy persona, as well as the backstory and novels that have been underground successes. With this latest revelation, it seems that we may finally be close to a mea culpa that puts JT Leroy to rest once and for all. St. John also suggests, and I would tend to agree, that these folks have done Leroy fans a great disservice: It is unclear what effect the unmasking of Ms. Knoop will have on JT Leroy's readers, who are now faced with the question of whether they have been responding to the books published under that name, or to the story behind them.The Savannah Knoop revelation also helps explain the odd experience I had when I met Leroy several years ago. The Leroy I met was so furtive and inscrutable that it was impossible to get any sense of who he was. Now it looks like there was no Leroy at all.

Fresh off of shilling the latest feel good tome from Mitch Albom in its thousands of locations, Starbucks has taken a more serious turn with its follow up selection. Soon to appear at the many Starbucks undoubtedly near you is a memoir by a former child soldier from Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. According to the AP's Hillel Italie, Starbucks sold nearly 100,000 copies of Albom's book, meaning that this selection represents a huge windfall for both Beah and his publisher FSG.Interestingly, the book's selection continues a mini-trend in the popularity of books about or based on the tragic lives of child soldiers in Africa, including Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala and What is the What by Dave Eggers (reviewed recently by Garth). Starbucks is also, of course, part of the larger trend, several years old now, whereby entities outside of the book industry bestow bestseller status upon a book, and publishers and authors all wrangle to, in effect, win the lottery. At least in this case the lottery is being won by an unknown rather than an overexposed bestselling author like Albom. Meanwhile, the ultimate king-maker, Oprah, will later this month be making her first new book club selection in more than a year.